Every farce needs doors, preferably at least three of them. They must be robust enough to be slammed, frequently, and for characters to revolve through at speed, communications thwarted, connections…
Author: Claire Seymour
Ian Bostridge and Julius Drake, Live from London: ‘Transfigured Love’
VOCES8’s Summer ’22 — LIVE From London series has offered the ensemble the opportunity to form new partnerships, and this recital by Ian Bostridge and Julius Drake was recorded in…
Il tabarro: Sir Mark Elder and the Hallé Orchestra play Puccini at the Proms
A barge is moored along a wharf on the Seine River, the sluggish flow of which is a hard-working metaphor in Puccini’s one-act Il tabarro (The cloak) – for the…
Live from London – I Fagiolini: The Feast of San Rocco, Venice, 1608
In May 1608, the English traveller and eccentric, Thomas Coryat (c.1577-1617), set off on a continental tour of Europe which would take him, often on foot, through France and Italy…
Richard Blackford’s Pietà at the Three Choirs Festival
The Stabat Mater is a Latin hymn, probably dating from the 13th century, which commemorates and mediates upon the sorrow and grief of the Virgin Mary at the Crucifixion, as…
Dyson’s Quo Vadis at the Three Choirs Festival
George Dyson began composing his nine-movement ‘cycle of poems’, Quo Vadis, in 1936 and completed it as the Second World War was ending, in 1945, but if it the grand…
Beyond the Garden: a haunting one-act opera by Stephen McNeff
Theodor Adorno called her ‘the monster’; the wife of the writer Friedrich Torberg derided her as ‘a grande dame and at the same time a cesspool’. Yet, Alma Mahler was…
Burgeoning with life: Tête à Tête announce an exciting 2022 Opera Festival programme
Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival 2022 is a-blossom with wild, unique and unexpected operatic shoots as the outlandish opera company continues to nurture theatre-makers with a diverse range of…
Post-Straussian sumptuousness at the Three Choirs Festival
For many, Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs (1948) represent the last great flowering of German Romanticism. 84 years of age, worn down by the tribulations and devastation of the Second…
A rare double bill of Delius and Puccini: moving melodrama from Opera Holland Park
Opera Holland Park has a tradition of bringing little-known verismo operas into the light and making them shine. In recent years, the company has excelled with stagings of Mascagni’s Iris…